VacationSelector

Cardiff or Lucerne?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Cardiff
✓ Best match
48
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Lucerne
33
match

Wins on good for families and museums & heritage with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

CardiffLucerne
Beaches & swimming. Cardiff leads by 46 points.46
CardiffLucerne
Score460
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km816
Coast distance2 km669 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Cardiff leads by 13 points.13
CardiffLucerne
Score6047
Restaurants within 2 km of centre541269
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3225
Museums & heritage. Lucerne leads by 1 points.1
CardiffLucerne
Score3940
Museums within 10 km6123
Museums within 2 km of centre613
Share of museums within 2 km %1057
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Cardiff leads by 20 points.20
CardiffLucerne
Score4828
Drinking venues within 4 km536202
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre395151
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7475
Nightclubs within 4 km3511
Nature & day trips. Cardiff leads by 25 points.25
CardiffLucerne
Score5025
Protected land share 50 km %187
Landscape blanket share 50 km %150
Land share of disc %68100
Park area within 2 km88 hectares29 hectares
Good for families. Lucerne leads by 6 points.6
CardiffLucerne
Score3238
Tourist attractions within 2 km415
Park area within 2 km88 hectares29 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Cardiff leads by 10 points.10
CardiffLucerne
Score4535
Notable places within 2 km5129
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cardiff leads by 19 points.19
CardiffLucerne
Score5435
Price level global84.9110.5
Daily budget€248
Year-round weather. Cardiff leads by 1 points.1
CardiffLucerne
Score5453
Monthly daytime high7.7 °C to 20.2 °C3.6 °C to 24.3 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm60 mm to 128 mm
Dry months00
0255075100

When should you go?

The figures behind each month. Each row is shaded against that destination's own year, so the deepest cell is its best month for that measure and the palest its weakest. Shades are not comparable between the two rows.

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Daytime high, °C
Cardiff
8
8
10
13
16
18
20
20
18
14
11
9
Lucerne
4
5
10
15
19
22
24
24
19
14
8
4
Sea temperature, °C
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Lucerne
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Lucerne
62
60
71
80
126
128
126
119
87
85
76
84
Daylight, hours per day
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Lucerne
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Lucerne
2
3
5
6
6
7
7
7
5
3
2
1

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cardiff: 1991-2020 normals, Cardiff-Wales Airport (14.9 km from centre). Lucerne: 1991-2020 normals, Zurich Town / Ville. (41.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCardiffLucerne
PalmaPMI
2 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 50 m
€84-103
ZRH · 49 km
AntalyaAYT
4 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
3 h 15 m
€154-180
ZRH · 49 km
MadridMAD
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 5 m
€158-220
1 stop
ZRH · 49 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 40 m
€114-151
ZRH · 49 km
GenevaGVA
1 h 40 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
55 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 20 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
1 h 25 m
€234-276
ZRH · 49 km
BerlinBER
2 h 0 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 25 m
€140-176
ZRH · 49 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 15 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
6 h 15 m
€232-366
1 stop
ZRH · 49 km
New DelhiDEL
8 h 40 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
7 h 55 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
8 h 20 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km

The busiest departure cities for these two, with a place kept for each other part of the world. Busiest means arriving passengers where an official count exists, and where none does, the number of non-stop services flown: official route statistics are published by the European reporting countries and by nobody else, so a table ranked on them alone would offer a reader in New York or Tokyo ten European cities. Flying times are estimated from the distance between airports, and every row is a city flown non-stop to both. Where the typical offer connects anyway, the stops are shown. Under each figure is the airport the flight lands at and how far that is from the centre, because the nearest airport is not always the one a route is flown to. Where both columns name the same airport it is one flight, and the difference between the two is the distance printed beside it. Typical return fares for 2026-08 to 2026-09, cached market data up to 7 days old. The figure is the middle half of the offers found, so a single price means they agreed and a range means they did not; for a typical route that middle half spans about a quarter of the median, and for the least settled routes rather more than the median itself.

Before you go

MeasureCardiffLucerne
Official languageEnglishFrench, German, Italian, Romansh
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Swiss Franc (CHF)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCJ230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation41 m436 m
Main airportCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinationsZürich Airport (ZRH)49 km from centre181 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureCardiffLucerne
City population383,53686,234
People per km²2,7342,963
Museums within 10 km914
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre5546
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cardiff or Lucerne somewhere new.

Browse every destination we have measured

Sources

© OpenStreetMap contributors, data available under the Open Database Licence. Place counts include data from Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA Permissive 2.0), assembled from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and other providers. Notable-place counts from Wikidata (CC0), weighted by Wikipedia language editions. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. Non-stop route lists from the "Airlines and destinations" tables on English Wikipedia airport articles, by Wikipedia contributors, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Currency from the ISO 4217 register maintained by SIX, cross-checked against country data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), CC BY 4.0. Time zones from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); clock offsets computed from the IANA time zone database. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Daylight hours computed from each destination's latitude using the NOAA solar position algorithm. Typical fares from Travelpayouts (Aviasales data). Route-level air passenger statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0.

Scores follow rubric v2; snapshot generated 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.